Why designers should listen to the voice of the customer when developing their user experience.

The skillset of a designer is changing rapidly. No longer just pixel pushers who make things look pretty, these days the heart of good design inherently links itself with the end user and the customer.

Over the last few weeks, as Brandtone’s UX Designer, I have started conducting customer interviews in order to gain insights into what our customers want, or don’t even realize that they need yet. By using a semi-structured interview approach, and asking open ended questions, it leaves the interviewee plenty of scope to give us real insights, often revealing things that we would never find out otherwise.

Often, the most useful snippets of information are uncovered, not through answering a direct question but when the interviewee is given time to ramble down their own train of thought and speak off course about the question.

One brand manager told me he would often check Konnect on his mobile phone over the weekend. As many of his campaigns could start on a Saturday, he would be keen not to have to wait until Monday in the office to check on the campaign’s performance. In essence, this validates the extra work that was put in to make Konnect a fully mobile responsive website and would support the possibility of developing it as a mobile app in the future. It’s no surprise that all our users were interested in the ‘Performance’ section of Konnect but from asking them to describe how they gather the data and present it externally, clear actionable improvements were revealed. This feedback gives us a framework of priorities to work on, having confirmed what the actual real-world users want.

As well as contributing to the product roadmap, these interviews also lead to creating a much richer picture of our end user. By researching their profiles - what type of websites they visit, online tools they use, their hobbies, interests and goals - we can create a clearer understanding of them and really remind us of who we are designing this product for.

Finally, a quote from one of our South African clients, when asked if he would recommend Konnect:

“It’s the only tool that we’ve got that measures external performance. If we had our own platform then cool, we’d have no need, but we don’t. Definitely for now, it is the tool of choice.”